Current diagnosis of cancer typically requires instrumentation and costly technology involving expensive reagents and long wait times to obtain results. The expanding field of synthetic biology has yet to be fully leveraged for clinical applications, primarily due to safety concerns and a difficulty in engineering robust circuits in vivo. Accelerating high impact medical applications require utilizing methods that interface directly with medical infrastructure, genetic circuits that function outside of the controlled lab setting, and safe and clinically-accepted microbial hosts. Bacteria have been genetically engineered to participate in luminescence-, PET-, and MRI-based imaging modalities for tumor detection [CITES]. Although these diagnostics each have specific utility, they have required intravenous or intratumoral delivery and expensive equipment, limiting their application to select cases. Strategies to employ quick and non-invasive diagnostic methods for cancer detection are desirable.